- The Dividends You’ve Earned
In all this talk of raising vital animals, you may wonder,
What’s the practical outcome of all this? Is it worth the effort to buck the system and raise animals outside the conventional veterinary model?
Yes indeed, my dear, your efforts in natural health reap rich rewards.
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How about freedom from all manner of parasites, without toxic drug use?
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How about natural disease resistance, exemplary health and dramatically lowered veterinary bills?
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How about changing the world?
Working Myself Out of Work
What I’ve seen over the years is that the people who, even 25 years ago, brought their animals in to get started on the natural path, have rarely needed to see me since!
Oh, they might well have brought in quite unhealthy animals at the start.
I’m a doctor, after all, so that’s what I attract: animals who are sick.
And, before I started teaching via this blog, the Vital Animal Podcast, and courses and such, I saw a lot of sick animals!
And, it seemed there were always many more scratching at my door to join my homeopathic veterinary practice.
More often than not, conventional medicine had let them down.
Unable to cure their sick animals.
Often with stories of spending 1000’s before landing at my small clinic.
One reason I’ve taken teaching more seriously and stopped taking new patients is the power of scale:
- when I teach a course, I can reach and help innumerable people to help their animals.
When I merely doctor the sick, it’s just not scalable:
- I’d spend an hour or more just to get an animal started on individually tailored homeopathic medicine.
How many hours in the day?
How many animals are sick and could use help?
Countless.
It’s not a workable model to improve animal health on any kind of broad scale.
So, this website was born, and is now in its third fourth iteration.
And courses are the focus.
To teach you what I’ve learned in holistic vet practice for the past several decades.
Prevention is redefined in each one, away from what seems to continue to drive conventional medical practices.
Prevention Paying Dividends
When my long time client Sara brought me Austin’s first known case of canine influenza, she already had Mika on a correctly chosen homeopathic remedy from her emergency kit, and Mika was improving.
But, deeper than that, she learned so much about raising natural animals from me in the late ’90’s that her animals had developed natural disease resistance.
My veterinary services were rarely needed.
Sara graciously shared this for the TV interview we gave to KVUE, but alas, her kind testimonial didn’t make the cut.
In favor of the reporter’s blab about the flu vaccines that “vets are not certain will protect against this strain of dog flu.”
(If you’re being cajoled to give the current dog flu vaccine, you can read that last link and join those who know the correct and certain answer.)
TV news aside, I heard Sara’s appreciation of all she learned and how this website provides such useful, free information, and I felt like my teaching had all been worthwhile.
The sick dog she started with in the 90’s got better in short order, but more significantly, Sara learned how to raise Vital Animals.
That knowledge was still serving her that, on her third generation of remarkable Akitas.
Yours Got Fleas, Mine Got None
A great example came recently from my client Dana, who learned this stuff well before meeting me. She has a great true story of traveling to a show in a van. Three of her naturally raised dogs packed in for hours with three of her friend’s dogs.
Her friend used everything Dr. WhiteCoat had to offer:
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Vaccinations, when ever they were “due”
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Flea pesticides, the latest and greatest topical or oral poisons
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Dewormers and heartworm pesticides
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Processed food diets
In other words, pretty much everything I’ve been teaching people to avoid over the past 40 years!
After the long drive to the show, this mixed pack of dogs showed and won ribbons, exercised and played in a sand ring, stayed a couple days, and loaded up for the long drive home.
A few days after returning home, Dana’s friend called her to warn her.
Her dogs were covered with fleas!
They were even crawling on her son!
I’ve dosed everyone with Frontline and you should, too!”
After a thank you, Dana examined her own dogs, who hadn’t been scratching particularly.
The result? No fleas!
And none weeks later, as well.
Dana’s years of raising vitally healthy animals by doing all these things I’ve been teaching for years paid off big time.
Fleas But Not Itchy
Many years ago, I had a brief dog sitting stint for a friend’s pup.
This lanky Golden Retriever, about a year old, came to stay at my farm for a few weeks while her owner was sorting out her life.
This happened in Texas.
In the Summer.
That’s a recipe for fleas, which make a regular appearance here whenever the weather warms up.
Stella wasn’t a particularly itchy dog.
She was so busy playing and chewing and running and exploring and just being thrilled with her wonderful life on the farm, that pure joy largely defined her happy, ebullient personality.
One day, while rubbing her belly, I noticed no less than twenty fleas scurrying away from the light!
She was crawling with them!
It struck me at that moment: this is what a “normal” dog experiences when they have fleas:
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no redness
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no hot spots
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not even very itchy!
Why did she have fleas?
Oh, I’m sure she’d been on a kibble of some sort, had a bunch of vaccinations in the pound, along with dewormers and heartworm pesticides and flea chemicals all dumped on or into her before she’d arrived in my friend’s arms.
So, there was plenty of reason to have fleas.
Her resistance had been compromised by these common interventions of conventional “prevention.”
But what struck me was how little effect these crawling, blood sucking menaces had had on Stella!
She really was largely ignoring them, and her body was intelligently dealing with them.
This was revelatory to me, having seen the more common flea allergic dogs in my practice for years.
The dogs who, with one flea bite, would break out into horrible non-stop itching, denuding their hair, chewing their rumps into huge raw, oozing spots, and generally living in misery, their very life defined by their immune over reaction to this common parasite.
If you haven’t had a dog like this yet, you’ve probably seen a few.
So, Vital can have stages.
This pup was compromised and got fleas, while Dana’s dogs didn’t even attract them.
But Stella was not yet impacted enough by conventional veterinary medicine to have flea allergy dermatitis.
I could predict she’d end up there, if her new owner bought into the machine that is so often encouraged by Dr. WhiteCoat.
Worms? Meh.
Another quick story from Dana, who along with a friend, picked up a puppy each from a new litter. Both were loaded with worms.
Her friend calls to say,
This poor pup has worms! So many worms, I can’t believe it. She’s even vomiting worms!”
She goes on to treat her pup with drugs, but Dana waits, knowing her raw balanced diet and “tincture of time” will allow her pup to kick out worms as she gains health.
The worms indeed gradually left, made a brief reappearance at one year old (a few tapeworm segments), and she has been clear ever since. She’s now 7 years old and Vital.
Natural disease resistance includes internal parasite resistance.
Nice.
Oh, and if you haven’t already, you probably want to subscribe to Dana’s excellent Dogs Naturally Magazine.
So, Worth Your Effort?
So, I hope you can get a glimpse here of what’s possible for your animals when you take the steps to make them Vital Animals.
Your efforts are, at a minimum, building natural resistance to parasites like fleas and worms.
When you build this resistance, will you worry about Lyme or ringworm or the next big plague to make the news?
Not likely.
I suspect you’ll be too busy enjoying your animals and getting compliments at the dog park or show ring.
And that’s really my larger goal for you.
Well, that and changing the world.
Tell us in the comments if you’ve seen similar rewards for your efforts to think outside the box when it comes to animal health.
